Tag Archives: discovery

I started in a different location. Got 2 signals within 18″ of each other. Dug the first: a Sharps. Checked the hole, and had another signal (around 30-40 VDI). That signal turned out to be a pistol bullet. Checked the hole again, another 30-40 signal…another pistol bullet. At this point I was getting excited! Rechecked the hole, another pistol bullet! Once again, I checked the hole after digging….another signal! And now there seemed to be several! This process was repeated another 17 times, and all from an area about 4′ around!!!! I was incredulous!!
We continued digging bullets for the next 30 minutes to an hour. All of a sudden, over the sound of my headphones and threshold hum, I hear, “Holy $#^%$!! That’s about the most personal thing you could find! Tony, come look at this thing!! #%$%, $^%$^, *&^%$!!!!!! ”
James was waving me over. He’d just dug what appears to be a crude ID tag!! It was a small silver coin, which was obviously VERY old. It had the following writing in cursive: “J. D. H____” and the date “1841”. James was shaking when he handed it to me to look at!

Now, the Bugle had assumed that this discovery had been made by someone waving their metal detector around on Blackheath. There’s a Google Map on the Treasure Map site, showing where the discovery was made. I looked at it, and didn’t recognise any of the place names. So I zoomed out a little. Perhaps it was in Kent? As I zoomed out, I noticed that the main roads all had little badges on them. Then it hit me. This map wasn’t in Blackheath, in Kent, or even in the UK… The find was made in the USA…

Before you get too excited about the prospect of ships exporting bits of Blackheath across the Atlantic, the Golf Tracer website points out that:

These buttons were reproduced in many different variations and are plentiful throughout the World.

So the badge shown above doesn’t necessarily come from Blackheath – it could be the 19th Century equivalent of the Manchester United football shirt: from the UK, but manufactured (and worn) all over the place.

It’s still pretty amazing to think that a piece of Blackheath’s culture travelled so far back then… Perhaps someone with more knowledge than me can contact Clem McNure & Tony and let them know a little more about how the badge ended up there?